Part mutant mix tape and part free-noise wig-out, Cock ESP's entry in the Recycled Music Series is, as I expected, one of the weirder RRR tapes that came in this week. This recording from the Minneapolis noise group is also one of the oldest Recycled tapes that I've picked up from RRRecords for the shop, having been released back in 1995. Like most of these tapes, there aren't any song titles, just two sides of formless weirdness.

The first side starts off with several minutes of awful Southeast Asian easy-listening Casio pap echoing out of a melted cassette, the saccharine pop rendered all murky and deformed by an over-driven dub job, and it gets more distorted as it goes along until it finally gets obliterated by a harsh, slow moving wave of junk-noise and feedback abuse. The tape continues on through muffled answering machine messages from punk rock festival promoters, insanely distorted live recordings of Cock ESP, brain-melting echoplex freak outs, and other random mania, and it gets heavier and more chaotic the deeper in you get, with most of this sounding like the material had been taken from low-fi live recordings.

The band eventually builds into a massive psychedelic junk noise jet-roar cacophony that goes on for more than ten minutes, carrying over to the other side where they immerse themselves in a gibbering, frenzied, oscillator-howling storm of noise and random room ambience and massive amounts of tape hiss and mic distortion. Towards the end of the second side, they slip in some samples taken from a 70's prog/psych record that goes on for a few minutes, and then switches back into more amorphous noise, brief snippets of found music, and random film samples.